The Empress Chronicles by Suzy Vitello (Review)

Liz has OCD and it has lead to issues with food and germs. When she is forced to move to a farm on the outskirts of Portland with her Dad, she fears the worst, and she worries she won’t be able to handle it. She finds comfort in the diary of Elisabeth of Bavaria, who became the Empress of Austria. She realises she may have the power to change history, and to change herself.

I’m still not sure what I think of this. I think it is probably just an average read, nothing special, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a bad book either. It was dull in places and I did find myself getting bored and wishing the story would hurry up. I found that the ‘magical’ element of the book was a little bit pointless, and a bit unrealistic. Obviously, anything magic isn’t realistic, but the way Liz came to the conclusion that she did about the book. I don’t know, something about it felt like it was just a little far fetched. Perhaps it is because the world building wasn’t very good, that it all felt very fake and flat.

The characters, though interesting, felt a little flat to me, especially Sisi. I felt that Liz was the more interesting, and she was the one who had the character development, where as I don’t think Sisi had any character development. I think Liz was more interesting because it was interesting being in the mind of someone who had OCD, and we could see how she battled it and how she managed, to not overcome it yet, but she was making progress, and I think that there was some decent development with Liz. Sisi however, was a let down. I felt like the setting in Sisi’s time wasn’t done very well and I didn’t really get a sense of 1800s.